Writing Assessment Fairness

     This year is the first year my school district is implementing writing assessments that are to be reported to the district and are to carry on in the students' files to middle school. The assessments are each quarter (not including first quarter) and are on the topic that was focused on throughout the specific quarter. A prompt is given, the students have 15 minutes to talk with their peers about brainstorming and then they have 30 minutes to complete the prompt and edit.
     It is important to assess student growth and performance, however I have an issue with the time restraint that has been placed on the students for this assessment. I feel that the entire writing process is negated by not allowing the students to draft, revise and edit their work in a large enough time period. I am also brought to the issue of how to grade these assessments. The entire fifth grade is completing the same prompt and the county has given a rubric to go with the prompt that we are to use to grade with. One of the main reasons there have not been standardized writing assessments is because of how subjective writing is. Individual teachers have different levels of writing expectations, recognize that what is great work and growth for one student may not, and probably wont, look the same for another student and keep this in mind when grading.
    My team has been left with the task of implementing this assessment with no choice and then having to grade all together. My teammates and I began discussing the fairness of the assessment and the only thing we came up with to try and lessen the subjectiveness of our grading was that we would each take 6 students from each person's class to grade so that no one class was graded by the same teacher. I think this is a good idea, yet I'm still left frustrated with the idea of fairness in writing.

Tier 1, 2 and 3

    My teammates and I are receiving modules for transition to the Common Core. This past week our module was on vocabulary instruction. The Common Core focuses on three tiers of vocabulary - tier 1, basic everyday language, tier 2, academic language that appears across numerous texts, and tier 3, content specific academic language. As I sat through this module, I thought back to our class discussion on word study and how important it is to make activities and the words in them authentic and meaningful. A point that was brought up in the module was how it is important that we, as educators, find the balance between telling the students the vocabulary terms before reading and letting them have a healthy struggle to figure out meaning through context clues and other strategies.

   It was also said in the meeting that the most important tier of vocabulary, and the most difficult, to explicitly teach are the tier two words. These are words that the students will encounter frequently, yet are not always given enough context clues to fully find the meaning. I left the module feeling like I had a lot of homework to do.

http://d97cooltools.blogspot.com/2012/09/commoncoreunpackingacademicvocabulary.html

I found this site with information on the vocabulary focus in Common Core. It gives an overview of each tier and goes into helping the educator with ideas for tier two words. I particularly liked how the site provides many technology based activities that are not time consuming, yet meet the needs of the educator. I think that using technology with vocabulary instruction would make the students more engaged as often times explicit vocabulary instruction is not the most enthralling activity for students.

Books for research.....say whaaaat?

I am currently in the middle of a museum project with my class. I got the idea to have the students turn our classroom into a museum and each create their own exhibit after reading an article by Dr. Eakle on museum literacies assigned by Melissa in the previous class of hers I took. I thought it was a great idea as I love to create projects based around student interest.

This week we began talking about doing actual research for their exhibit topic (previously we had written memoirs on how we became interested in the topic to stay in line with the CCSS). I asked my class how people research topics they are interested in. Not surprisingly, the majority of my class told me that you should hop on google, type in the topic and pick a site for any answers you will need. Although this is not incorrect, it got me thinking about the world in which kids are growing up in and some of our discussions on how much technology to incorporate in the classroom and at what age. I found myself somewhat saddened by the fact that the answer of how to research something is no longer immediately to go to the library. I already knew that I was going to have the students use online resources as part of their research papers and have collaborated with my media specialist but I made a decision then and there to not make using a book source optional. Today I assigned going to the library and getting two books on their topic as homework and sent out an email to all of my parents making them aware of this and asking to please let me know if they would be unable to go to a library in which case I would go for them. I then went to my school's media center after school and checked out every book I could find on each of the student's topics.

Today I was hit smack in the face with a harsh hit of reality and the need to constantly remember that the things I valued and experienced in school will not always be pertinent today. I left school today with the knowledge that I want my students to not only understand how to research given topics, but to understand the importance and benefit of all types of sources.

Will we ever reach a point where we have to build using books into lessons as opposed to building technology into lessons?

RTI

      We are all aware that no child learns in the exact same way as another. As education progresses, methods and programs are created and enhanced in order to meet the needs of all the different learners in a classroom. From our discussion last week on ability grouping and differentiated instruction, I began thinking about the newest push in ways to reach all students. There are still plenty of educators out there who remain in the school of thought that you only need to change one aspect of your classroom to be able to meet the needs of all students in the room (generalizing here). In reality, to be an effective classroom teacher and have the most beneficial learning environment you need to be implementing many different things. Grouping needs to be fluid and able to change according to student needs, interest, ability levels, etc., instruction needs to be differentiated according to the method of instruction, product the students are to be produced and guided and reassessed according to formative assessments.
        One reasonably new approaches to education is the Response to Intervention (RTI). It has not been adopted in all states and school districts, but I believe it to be a good program. While teaching in NYC, the school I was in began using RTI and I found it to make sense and be extremely useful. RTI states that there are levels to interventions to meeting the needs of all learners, there are constant assessments and reassessments so students are never kept in one intervention when they don't need to be. I like that the teacher is held responsible for documenting and rationalizing what interventions are chosen and why, if they worked and why/why not, and that any intervention chosen after tier one has to have proven research based results to support the use. The link below explains with good visuals how RTI works and how each tier of intervention works together to benefit each and every student. What I like most about the RTI method is that it 100% supports inclusion in the classroom of not only special education students, but also students from diverse backgrounds.

http://www.rti4success.org/whatisrti

Universal Pre-K Push Down Problem

         I am fully on the bandwagon that Pre-K should be made universal and offered in all public schools. As education continues to move forward, as America tries to distinguish itself as a leader in the classroom, and as teachers experience the top-down approach to curriculum, it only makes sense that within the near future students are going to need to go to Pre-K in order to be ready and successful with the ever increasing objectives that students in Kindergarten are expected to meet. We already see the disadvantage students experience when they have not been to an academic preschool/daycare before entering Kindergarten. Giving students from all backgrounds access to begin their literacy learning in an academic setting earlier rather than later will benefit them for all of the school years to come.
         With that, as nice as it would be to think that making Pre-K mandatory would shrink the achievement gap, it is completely unrealistic. Just as with educational objectives having things pushed down, the same would happen to affluent families and poverty stricken families. Currently, students who come from affluent backgrounds go to the "best" preschools that money can buy and students from poorer families may go to a family babysitter during the day or a head start program, that because of funding, cannot provide the same experiences as schools with higher funding. In this day and age, most parents hold jobs where they need their children to be taken care of during the day. Just as it is now, wealthy parents are able to send their children to great preschools while parents who are struggling to get by on their wages have no choice but to send their children to the most cost efficient setting. Even though I think that having Universal Pre-K would be a good thing, I do not foresee it doing anything to change the gap that we already see between students when they enter Kindergarten...we are just going to start seeing that gap arise at a younger and younger age and the next question to be asked will be 'what are the skills a student entering Pre-K needs to be successful?'

Alphabet Instruction

      As we all know, teaching the alphabet - letter recognition, letter formation and letter sounds, is a major part of literacy education in the emergent years. After reading Developing Early Literacy Skills: A Meta-Analysis of Alphabet Learning and Instruction I thought back to when I was teaching Pre-K and Kindergarten. The journal looked at instructional models of teaching the alphabet and what results each yield. Through the study, the author became aware that there is a lack of data to support instructional methods for alphabet learning. It was stressed that the outcome of students mastering the information outweighs the actual method of instruction.

    This got me wondering more about what the Pre-K I was teaching prescribed for the most effective way to teach the alphabet and the difference between what I encountered when I began teaching Kindergarten. In the school where I taught Pre-K they believed in a direct and explicit instructional approach to teaching the alphabet. The teacher would introduce one letter a week, beginning with A, and the entire week would be devoted to practicing first saying the letter, then writing the letter (upper then lowercase) and finally working on the sound that the letter made. This approach was effective with the students, however, looking back I wonder if it would have been equally as effective if the children had not been in the daycare/preschool setting since the age of 2. When I moved to teaching Kindergarten, that school used the Orton-Gillingham method for teaching the alphabet. In this method the teacher is to introduce the letter O first because it is the easiest shape for young children to make and the shape that many other letters build off. Subsequent letters are introduced based on their use of the round shape in formation and only after that were other letters introduced. The Orton-Gillingham method focuses on teaching the alphabet with a kinesthetic and visual learner in mind. The students spend time forming the letter in the air or in sand while saying it and then move to the sound the letter makes followed directly by a word that begins with that same sound. I liked the Orton-Gillingham approach to teaching the alphabet because I feel that it hits a wider variety of learners. Yet, I am still left to question what is the most effective order to introduce the letters in? I learned the alphabet in the actual sequential order and I wonder does teaching the letters out of sequential order hinder their ability to then recite the alphabet? And, what is the true value of being able to recite the alphabet? Many times a child can do this but cannot identify a letter by name in isolation.


Piasta, S. B. (2010). Developing Early Literacy Skills: A Meta-Analysis of Alphabet Learning and Instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 45(1).

Current Cursive

      When discussing the developmental stages of young children we know that gross motor skills develop before fine motor skills. When children approach Kindergarten they begin to apply the fine motor skills that they are normally being coached on. Most of us remember learning to write cursive around the time of third grade. Some of us may have spent half an hour a day doing drills on letter formation counting down the minutes until it was over while others of us may still use cursive in their everyday writing.
       States that have adopted the Common Core Curriculum are no longer required to teach cursive in school. It is at each school's discretion whether they think that cursive holds value in today's current education system or not. I am one of the many adults who do not write in cursive at all, in fact, I can barely do it if I try. I moved to the states after third grade and missed the direct instruction of cursive and had to catch up on my own so that I could get by when it was mandatory to use cursive (on the pledge on the SATs for example). With the Common Core not including cursive in its plan it leads me to question the value of continuing to teach cursive in schools. I personally don't believe that it is necessary to know how to do it to function well in society or in a job. However, I have noticed in myself that when taking notes quickly it is more efficient to join my letters together. Many peers who use cursive state efficiency as the main reason they write in cursive. I read "The Great Cursive Debate" article (http://www.aaeteachers.org/index.php/blog/395-the-great-cursive-debate) and one thing I found interesting was the mention of special educators saying that cursive helps students with learning disabilities (dyslexia and dysgraphia especially) to get their thoughts out more clearly. I can see where the link would be made of having a flow in the formation of letters may help the flow of thought and would be interested to look into studies that support this or not.
      If schools are to continue teaching cursive, I am then pondering another question - is third grade too early or too late to begin instruction?

   Welcome to my blog! I will use this space to delve deeper into the world of literacy - how children develop and acquire the skills to come to read, write, listen and speak. Through sharing my thoughts I hope to further my understanding of literacy and provoke thinking from my readers. Enjoy!